Summary: Hardware-Oriented Point-Based Rendering of Complex Scenes
Liviu Coconu Hans-Christian Hege
Abstract
High quality point rendering methods have been developed
in the last years. A common drawback of these approaches
is the lack of hardware support. We propose a novel point
rendering technique that yields good image quality while
fully making use of hardware acceleration.
Previous research revealed various advantages and draw-
backs of point rendering over traditional rendering. Thus,
a guideline in our algorithm design has been to allow both
primitive types simultaneously and dynamically choose the
best suited for rendering. An octree-based spatial repre-
sentation, containing both triangles and sampled points, is
used for level-of-detail and visibility calculations. Points in
each block are stored in a generalized layered depth im-
age. McMillan's algorithm is extended and hierarchically
applied in the octree to warp overlapping Gaussian fuzzy
splats in occlusion-compatible order and hence z-buffer tests
are avoided. We show how to use off-the-shelf hardware to